To date, most network decisions of communication service providers (CSPs), with respect to optimization, bandwidth allocation, congestion management, traffic shaping, capital expenditure (CAPEX) investment, and various predictions, are mainly based on network parameters (e.g. congestion indicators, performance metrics, faults, availability, etc.).
Customer experience has become one of the major metrics through which CSPs can differentiate themselves, and thus it has become increasingly important to consider the customer when making network decisions. These decisions may be from the real time area (i.e. in cell traffic prioritization), as well as for long term investment plans (e.g. determining where to deploy the next small cell or WiFi device, etc.). However, currently, customer value is not considered when making network planning and optimization decisions. Moreover, customer value is currently a fixed value, which does not allow the flexibility to adequately use such value in the context of network planning and optimization decisions.
There is thus a need for addressing these and/or other issues associated with the prior art.